A lot of people point out the visual parallels between Mel and Viktor but not enough people talk about the thematic parallels between them (also excuse the shitty screenshots).
they both grew up with mentors who ended up doing something they couldn't understand (Viktor believing death is better than sacrificing humanity, Mel believing war is bad)
and they remain haunted by that memory as an adult
they later left that mentor, Viktor on his own decision, Mel got cast out. Then they reconnected with that mentor when they are struggling with the same dilemma but their position has shifted. Again Viktor does this on his own accord and Ambessa comes to Mel
After this encounter though they realise their error and shift back to their original position
They stick to the same morals after Jinx's bomb hits but the decision was taken from them, Jayce already sacrificed Viktor's humanity, the council already decided on war
Then for the rest of season two we see them attempt to keep up their original stance but their hand is forced. (It is also interesting that Viktor is already taking away their humanity he just doesn't realize it yet, probably because he is so far from his own humanity he has forgotten what that even means)
They also both have parallels to the one they once defended as a kid
But I'm still having trouble finding what the purpose of all these parallels are. Viktor and Mel aren't very close in the narrative and they're both close to Jayce but I don't feel we see these parallels used in their relationship to him. I think the end point is that it's not Viktor's fault he became a villian in the end. Both him and Mel fought for what they thought was right and they both lost, it was only because of how others used Viktor that he was the reason so many people almost died.
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The Mutant kiss
I'm sure that there like 90% possibility that someone already did this, but I didn't saw it
"Why didn't they just communicate?? They're so stupid!" Have you considered that communicating with someone you love and value and don't want to hurt is scary and that vulnerability takes practice and that perfect characters with perfect words make the most boring stories of all
if house md were running in 2024 there would be an episode with a patient who identifies as an ‘online content creator’ (cagily) where house agrees to take the case primarily because when he offhandedly refers to her as an onlyfans model both cameron and cuddy get really offended and say it’s a sexist assumption so he doubles down and becomes committed to finding the patient’s onlyfans and proving it. at some point it would be revealed that chase actually is an onlyfans model and started doing it as a stopgap after his dad died and he suddenly got disinherited but he makes so much money off it that now medicine is basically just a hobby. cameron and foreman both disagree with the concept online sex work but it turns out they disagree for different reasons (cameron thinks it’s exploitative and not-feminist, foreman finds it distasteful and thinks people should get ‘real jobs’) and spend most of their scenes together arguing about this while chase gets continually more shifty. they break into the patient’s house and there’s a full ringlight and camera setup which seems to confirm house’s suspicions. while trying to find the patient’s onlyfans house accidentally finds chase’s onlyfans instead and considers publicly embarrassing him about it like he did with wilson’s sex tape but soon realises that most of the staff at the hospital are already subscribed to chase’s onlyfans so makes fun of him for that instead. it then transpires that the reason why the patient is so cagey about being a content creator is that she’s an ASMR artist and all the soap she’s been shaving on camera has irritated her lungs. cuddy is about to make house give her 20 extra hours of clinic duty as recompense but at last minute it’s revealed that the website the patient uses for some of her bonus commissions is, drumroll…onlyfans, because she’s been banned from patreon. how does house know this? wilson is subscribed to her because the soap videos sometimes soothe him to sleep. something by cigarettes after sex plays. roll end credits.
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do you ever think about how a series of tiny choices like "I guess I'll watch that show" can like totally and entirely change huge aspects of your life
one of the things i love the most about dsmp is the fact that no one has the same version of it. the most obvious example is which streamer's POV you watched, but it goes way beyond that because mcrp requires a level of suspension of disbelief and also of filling in the gaps, fleshening things out, in order to make it usable for fancontent.
for example, the fact that apart from the minecraft skin there is no actual guideline for how to see the characters, hence the dsmp creaturification of fan designs we've been over a million times. but it's not just that!!
the fandom also has so many different relations to time in the dsmp. some take the canon timeline but then you run into problems like c!fundy's age — so then either he's actually a 20 year old that c!wilbur adopted and treats like a baby, or perhaps fox hybrids have a very abrupt exponential growth spurt, or perhaps l'manberg wasn't a few months but a few years!
and then this brings into question the matter of scale — how populated is the server? is it truly only the actual streamers/characters, and so when we talk about a "war" do we really just mean like 10 people fighting each other with swords? or perhaps there's a couple dozen, unnamed, background characters? and i've seen people increase the scale even more! make l'manberg a real, albeit obviously small and budding, country-city of a few hundred inhabitants, that perhaps grows into a lifesize scale fortified city during new l'manberg.
and then everything takes on such a different tone. if theres 30 people on the server, the final control room was a betrayal and destruction of friendships, november 16th was the grief and anger for a friend and the symbolic destruction of the country, and doomsday was another symbolic show of whose alliances everyone values, and the weariness of having to rebuild it. if there's a few thousand people? all of those were massacres.
how can we even be talking about the same characters when for some of us the worst they've done is blow up some houses with no cost of lives, and for others they have razed to the ground actual nations? depending on how you read it and how much you flesh it out, dsmp is either mainly about symbols and interpersonal relationships, or it can be some game of thrones shit. it's completely fucking mental. i'm so in love with it
young zaunites
Mary Oliver, from a poem titled "When I Am Among The Trees," featured in Devotions: Poems